Recent studies on body techniques have explored various approaches to understanding the lived experience of performance, with the limitation that experts are not necessarily conscious when enacting skilled motions. This study combined the first- and third-person perspectives by asking interviewees to draw pictures of their experiences and provide verbal explanations, as well as by analyzing video recordings of their gestures during interviews. It focused on marionette theater artists' perceptions during performance. We found that the artists manipulated the marionettes in their own qualitative body space, allowing for a refined perception of the marionette's posture and frontal vision, which is normally invisible during manipulation. Further, we found that artists can perceive the subtle feedback of the strings transmitted to their hands through multisensory integration of their visual and auditory senses. Finally, while it was difficult for participants to verbalize their own bodily perceptions in the interviews, our multi-personal approach served as an effective way to fill in the blanks in participants' narratives and understand the quality of their experience. These results may contribute to the literature on expertise and may also suggest a philosophical reconsideration of the body-mind-object triad.
Okui et al. (Tue,) studied this question.